JHU Press Blog

In 1980, if one wanted to become a K-12 public school teacher in the United States, he or she needed to attend an accredited degree program. Fast forward to the present, and roughly one-third of our nation’s teachers enter through alternative, non-education school routes. Prospective teachers are confronted with a dizzying array of options, from online programs (both for- and not-for-profit), district residencies, quick-prep programs with a few weeks of summer training, in-house charter-school certification, or more traditional university-based pathways, at both the undergraduate and master’s level. How to explain this dramatic transformation? And what to make of it?

As two historians with public school teaching and university-based teacher education experience—and much concern about how this change has impacted students—we aimed to write a history that answers these questions while transcending much of the acrimony that often occupies the discussion. On one side of the debate, you often find ardent ed school defenders, those who write off any alternative route as irresponsible. On the other side are the ed school bashers, who claim that teachers do not need time in what they see as ineffective departments teaching “irrelevant” theory classes. We aimed to approach the recent and...Read More

It’s not easy to write a book on lobbying when lobbyists don’t like to talk about what they do. And it’s particularly difficult when the lobbyists you’re writing about have been dead for one hundred and fifty years. This was the challenge I found myself confronting when I set out to research Lobbyists and the Making of US Tariff Policy, 1816-1861 . In researching a previous book on American democratic practices in the early republic, I had become fascinated by fleeting references to lobbyists operating behind the scenes, way-laying Congressmen behind the closed doors of the committee room or in the privacy of their boarding-house parlors. But how to bring these practices out into the open, when by their very nature they were never intended to be made public?

Answering that question involved some old-fashioned detective work. I began by digging through the records of the many meetings and conventions held during the first half of the nineteenth century to express their support either for protectionism or free trade, a debate that was just as divisive then as it is today. These records sometimes contained explicit mention of the appointment of a “delegate” to make their case to Congress,...Read More

Predictions have an uncanny tendency to come true, just not in the way predicted. Take the early 1990s mantra of ‘the death of the book’---the existentially-laden theme of many a brow-furrowed academic conference, journal special issue, or edited collection. For someone who started a PhD about book publishing slap-bang in the middle of that fin-de-siècle decade, it seemed almost preternaturally bad timing. By the time Amazon had come to spectacular public prominence in the late 1990s, it appeared the die was well and truly cast. And yet, with the wisdom of a quarter-century hindsight, it’s now possible to see that, despite the incursions of eBooks, especially in genre publishing, the codex book remains very much alive. It is just created, edited, marketed, publicized, retailed, profiled, evaluated, and discussed within a thoroughly digital web of stakeholders. It’s time then to take stock of the state of bookish play with a list of the top 10 myths about digital literary culture: Digital media will kill paper books Oh, please. Is this 1995 still? Even a cursory glance at the literary internet shows how print and digital technologies have brokered a truce, coexisting and even becoming increasingly interdependent. Just as earlier...Read More

More searchable and discoverable than PDFs, the improved new format represents the “next chapter” in OA publishing in the humanities and social sciences

(Baltimore, MD) Nearly 300 open access (OA) books are now available from Project MUSE, the highly-acclaimed online collection of humanities and social science scholarship, on a newly designed platform that represents a major step forward in OA publishing in these fields. The books will be delivered in a highly-discoverable and adaptable format using user-friendly HTML5, rather than static PDFs, and will include titles from Johns Hopkins University Press, Cornell University Press, Duke University Press, University of Hawai’i Press, University of Michigan Press, Syracuse University Press, The MIT Press, and Temple University Press. “This really represents the next chapter in OA publishing for MUSE and our university press collaborators,” said Wendy Queen, Director of Project MUSE, “and we’re thrilled to have so many important works available open access on MUSE in such a flexible, useful format. Thanks to the ‘MUSE Open’ grant from the Mellon Foundation these titles are now available on a much improved MUSE platform and...Read More

In William Faulkner’s well-known aphorism “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Faulkner’s understanding of history forcefully applies to the story of Maryland during the Civil War. If we had forgotten his point, the recent controversy over the future of Baltimore’s Confederate monuments sharply reminds us of the immediacy of the Civil War and the various ways it is remembered in the 21 st century.

As I set out to write my chapter for Maryland: A History, I was animated by a desire to tell the story of the Maryland’s Civil War fairly and factually so that one of the most riveting events in our state history would be remembered by a new millennial generation in ways that limit the excesses of the past. In my view, having lost the war, the state’s southern sympathizers promptly turned their attention to winning the war in the history books. In this they were successful. The collective memory of the past as imposed by former Confederates and southern sympathizers created a collective memory that emerged as a powerful social tool useful in the establishment of white supremacy by the end of the 19 th...Read More

"There are no great people in this world, only great challenges which ordinary people rise to meet."—William Frederick Halsey, Jr.

Making decisions for another person at the end of their life is indeed a significant challenge. The challenge is even more poignant when the person has lost their voice to the progression of dementia. As a geriatrician specializing in end-of-life care in dementia, most of the people I encounter in my work lament that they would gladly make these decisions for themselves. Yet, it is unbearable to make similar arrangements for their mother, father, or spouse when they don’t entirely know what their family member would choose.

After learning that they have a range of care options from which to choose, and being introduced to the natural course of dementia (understanding that dementia is, in fact, a terminal disease), many family members feel the burden of decision-making lifted, or, at least, diminished. Taking the time to pause, imagine, and discuss what their family member may have chosen for themselves may at first seem challenging, but ultimately provides the decision maker with a sense of comfort. Leaning into the tough conversations is a first step toward managing the tough...Read More

As we walked to our car with our first-born in arms on an icy Minnesota morning in November 1996, nothing could have been further from my wife’s or my mind than college. We were more interested in answering “now what?” than thinking forward eighteen years. During those early days and years, fuzzy pajamas demanded more attention than a fuzzy, seemingly far-off future. We quickly learned that there is no precise definition of parenting or parenthood. Like all parents, we learned in real-time, mostly through trial and error. Three more children and years later, my wife and I have learned much about parenting – and about ourselves – though we still have not discovered either an owner’s manual or a magic eight-ball that conjures all the right answers.

In fall 2015, we sent the first of our four children off to college, an odyssey that will not end until spring 2027. We’ll have at least one child in college over that entire period, and two in college from fall 2018 to spring 2022. That timeline, which I typically choose to describe casually, almost always draws a gasp. What were we thinking?

Perhaps more than any other diagnostic category, PTSD is a vehicle for showing major historical changes in conceptions of mental illness. Examining the social evolution of PTSD provides an especially good way of showing how valuations of psychiatric diagnoses sharply change in different historical periods. Diagnoses of mental illness have typically been associated with negative consequences such as stigma, fear, shame, and guilt. In contrast, the conception of PTSD as being rooted in some external source can potentially cast blame and responsibility on an outer entity and so diminish the sufferer’s own accountability. Doing so brings issues of responsibility, blame, liability, and secondary gains into particularly sharp focus.

PTSD only became a consequential form of mental illness when trauma victims could hold a specific party responsible for providing damages. In the nineteenth century, “railway spine” brought to the fore issues of compensation that have persisted throughout the history of PTSD. Several decades later, conceptions of “shell-shock” emerged during World War I that led to vigorous debates over whether afflicted soldiers were cowards who were afraid of carrying out their duties or victims of overwhelming amounts of fear with which they were unable to cope. The evolution of PTSD thus...Read More

Ornithology represents the efforts of a diverse team of editors and chapter authors who span a wide range of expertise and career stages. Our goal was to provide material written by leading experts in each subject area who would provide the latest information on research and applications in ornithology. Our team of chapter authors includes scientists from six different countries, all of whom frequently engage with students, teach and/or have taught ornithology, and have active research programs.

While the textbook is intended for undergraduate and graduate students, it is also written to be useful for professionals who are experts in one or a few subject areas (e.g., ecology and behavior) and who want to expand the breadth of their knowledge (e.g., anatomy and physiology).

Each chapter integrates both historical and contemporary perspectives so that readers can appreciate how our understanding of each subject area has developed over time. We emphasize how the diversity of ornithological research reflects not only innovation in methodological approaches and tools, but also maturation of our ideas and the guiding paradigms that shape how we frame questions and interpret data. Our intent is that each chapter will help...Read More

Earlier this year, Feminist Formations released a special issue on " The Biosocial Politics of Queer/Crip Contagions " guest edited by Kelly Fritsch and Anne McGuire . Featuring 10 essays as well as poetry from Qwo-Li Driskill , the issue traces the multiple and unexpected ways queer and crip influence and infect one another. Fritsch and McGuire joined us for a Q&A about the special issue. You can listen to Driskill's poetry at the bottom of this post.

How did this special issue come about?

Kelly: Anne and I began working collaboratively together while I was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. Anne is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies and at the time, my office was just down the hall from hers. Our research and teaching interests have overlapped for many years and we have been on many conference panels together but we had never really had a chance to work on a collaborative project together.

Anne: We began working on some reading and writing projects revolving around questions of contagion, contamination, and discourses of risk, as well as the relationship...Read More